Alright, so I’m good friends with thepoorgeek.com, and we both tend to share a lot of the same kind of interests and content.
This site was originally intended, as evidenced by the name, to be a lot more ham radio focused than it’s ended up, and a lot more general project nerdery.thepoorgeek.com is run by a fantastic dude with some excellent knowledge and projects upcoming, but like me, often lacks the time to work on things except in spurts where we DO ALL THE THINGS.

Ok, so after some more testing the speakers sound not too bad, as long as they’re positioned with the rear port near a wall, like you’d optimally place a pair of Bose or other decent ported set.
I’ll be printing up the second one, and then releasing the .stl with my print instructions soon.
They should sound alright with any decent 3″ fullrange driver, but they were built with Tang-Band in mind. I imagine they’d sound nice with HiVi as well.

Welp, it kinda sounds like crap. Turns out there’s a reason you pay Bose the big bucks.
I printed with 3 shells and 15% infill, else it would have used over half a 1kg spool of PLA filament per box.

It sounds… tube-y. Go figure. Stuffing polyfill in the first and last bends of the pipe helps a lot with the resonance, but it still lacks punch. Sticking my hand over the port fixes it, so that at least tells me I’ve got good effective volume. I could just seal the hole in the next model and be done, or… Continue reading →

I’ve had a pair of these 3″ Tang Band drivers that I got from a Parts-Express buyout that have been sitting idle far too long, so I decided it was time to build a box for them.
I envisionsed a somewhat portable speaker bar setup, but after doing some calculations with various speaker box design suites it turned out that optimal ported box sizes for these little speakers are a bit too large.
Like, over two feet long, and 7 inches deep. TV speaker bar territory here, and a bit larger than my Replicator 2 could work with.
So I… Continue reading →

Playing with RetroPie/Retroarch on the Raspberry Pi 2, I found the glsl shader selection to be lacking somewhat, especially in the retro visual department.
Specifically I wanted to play with the ntsc and crt filters from the main Retroarch common-shader tree, but they’re all Cg shaders.
The NTSC shader chains tend to fail, don’t really know why. crt-caligari.glsl works a treat.
So here it is, the common-shaders tree from the libretro git on 10/3/2015. Do with it what you will, I take no responsibility for it blowing up your Pi/Pi2.retroarch-glsl-shaders.tar.gz

Normally the cans of grape concentrate sold by Alexander & Sons/California Concentrate Company are meant to be sold in pairs, as the default recipe is for a 5-gallon batch, and requires 2 46fl.oz. cans.

I’m not up for 5gallon batches yet (no room), so here we are with the recipe numbers converted and usable for smaller batches.
These will be calculated out per gallon of finished wine. Each can has enough for 2 1gallon batches, with some concentrate left over for backsweetening if you desire.

Valve has released SteamOS into the wild, and invited us to play.
And so I have, well outside the recommended parameters of their system requirements… because where’s the fun otherwise?
For reference: http://store.steampowered.com/steamos/buildyourown

My SteamOS test machine is an old Intel Core2Duo-based Mac Mini with an nVidia Geforce 9400 GPU. Not really a beefy gaming box, but adequate for simple games and playing videos with hardware acclerated decoding.
I started with the custom installer from the link above, and the install went surprisingly smoothly following their directions – until it came time for the recovery partition steps. Those flat out… Continue reading →